by James Cook
Additionally, spreading out distributes searching eyes farther afield, increasing our chances of finding salvage worth carrying back to town. We were not above saving the trip to Monument for another day if we found easier pickings.
Tyrel’s squad—me included—pulled ‘rabbit’ duty, which meant scouting ahead and setting the pace for the rest of the platoon. We covered eighteen miles before sundown, making me grateful for all the long, hard days spent working on the wall. It might have been hellish work, but it kept me in shape.
We stopped at the now-abandoned Air Force Academy and made camp on the rooftop of a service building. The building itself had been stripped long ago by the Army, along with the rest of the academy. First squad joined us a short time later, while third and fourth made camp on the other side of the campus.
The sun slid low behind the peaks of the Rampart Range behind me, painting the sky in blues and reds. The colors were richer and darker than I had ever seen them, and there was a sharp chill in the air. I thought about reports I’d heard of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East and wondered what color the sky was in Pakistan.
“Gonna be a cold winter,” one of Tyrel’s men said. Billings was his name. Late thirties, average height, lean build, brown hair and eyes, a well-tended beard. By the way he ran his fingers over it, I knew he was proud of that beard.
“You from around here?” I asked.
“Pretty close, yeah. Grew up down in Pueblo.”
“No shit?” Tyrel said. “I lived there ‘til I was eleven.”
Billings grunted. “Small world.”
Being the new guy, it was my job to prepare the evening meal. I boiled rice and dried venison over a small propane stove and served it on cold pre-made flatbread. The men in the squad were quiet as they ate, worn out by the day’s long hike. When we finished, I wiped the plastic dishes and aluminum cookware with a wad of boiled cloth and put them away. The other men bedded down for the night, but since I had the first watch, I took a few minutes to fix my suppressor to my rifle and attach my night vision scope. The man on watch with me, a short Mexican named Rojas, eyed my gear jealously.
“You could get a good price for that silencer,” he said.
“Suppressor. And it’s not for sale.”
He smiled like he knew something I didn’t. “Sooner or later, kid, everything’s for sale.”
The first two hours passed mostly in silence. Rojas held a crossbow in one hand and rested the other on a quiver of bolts hanging from his belt. A few times, he began singing softly to himself in Spanish, then stopped and shook his head ruefully, calling himself a few not-so-nice words in his native language. He seemed like a man trying to break a bad habit. Or not a bad habit, necessarily, but definitely a dangerous and unwise one.
We walked the perimeter of the rooftop, scanned the distance for infected, and conducted radio checks with the other squads across campus every half hour. Near the halfway point of our watch, a knot of four walkers heard our boots crunching on the tiny rocks covering the roof and wandered close. To Rojas, I said, “What should we do about those things?”
He looked at me from the corner of his eye. “What do you mean? We draw ‘em close and kill ‘em.”
“Won’t they start making noise if we do that?”
“You never seen a walker up close at night, have you?”
I shook my head.
“See man, at night they don’t make noise until they get right on you. Makes it easy to take ‘em out if you can spot ‘em in time. Here, watch this.”
He tapped his foot a few times, sending muted thumps out into the night. I watched through my scope as the walker’s heads snapped up and they increased their shuffling pace in our direction. Just as Rojas predicted, they made no sound.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Told you, man,” Rojas said. “When they’re close enough, take ‘em out.”
I let the undead approach to within fifty yards. By that point, I had lain down on the edge of the roof so I could fire from the prone position. The undead were a mixed group: one white guy in his twenties, a black girl no older than twelve or thirteen, an Asian woman who must have been in her nineties when she died, and a middle-aged Hispanic man with a great bushy moustache. Their wounds showed up black against the grainy green night-vision image. I let my breath ease out and squeezed the trigger. The little girl fell. The rest of the ghouls marched on heedlessly.
I kept the reticle on the girl for a few seconds, thinking about how long it had been since I’d shot a walker, and after everything I had been through, how little the killing affected me. It was as if the part of me that used to feel sorry for them, some kind of emotional sympathy gland, had atrophied during the long months in Colorado Springs.
“Nice shot,” Rojas said.
In response, I cracked off three more rounds in less than four seconds, each one finding its mark.
“Damn, kid.” Rojas’ teeth flashed white in silver of the moon. “You’re not a rookie, you’re a killer.”
I stood up and brushed myself off. “Something like that.”
FIFTY-ONE
We marched parallel to I-25 until we reached a road that ran under a highway overpass. It was early morning. The yellow circle of the sun was hazy and muted behind a gauze of powdery gray clouds. A bracing chill in the air kept us cool as we set a hard pace.
Rojas marched ahead of me as we turned off the highway and followed an access road up the slope of the Rampart Range. The altitude increased sharply for half a mile, then the lead squad turned right onto another road marked by a green sign gilded with ornate black ironwork, reading Aspen Applause Way. Another sign with tarnished brass letters announced we were entering Aspen Acres Luxury Homes.
LaGrange called the platoon to a halt and radioed for his squad leaders to meet him at the head of the column. While they talked, the rest of us sat down and drank some water. During the march, I had noticed a long, cylindrical bundle wrapped in brown canvas lashed to Rojas’ pack. Curious, I asked him about it.
“That’s my pride and joy,” he said, grinning. “You’ll see it when it’s time to kill some walkers.”
I raised an eyebrow, but let the matter sit. A few minutes later, Tyrel came back over.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” he said. “Third and fourth squads will head north and set up overwatch on the far side of the development. First squad will head east and hang back in reserve. LaGrange will monitor comms and direct operations as usual. Our job is to approach from the west and find out what we’re up against. Henning saw infected in the neighborhood when he reconned the place, but he didn’t get an accurate count. So keep your eyes open and stay on your toes. Rojas, I want you and Hicks on point. Show the new guy how we do business.”
“Works for me,” said Rojas.
“Caleb,” Tyrel continued, pointing at me. “Follow the man’s lead. He’s a pain in the ass sometimes, but he knows his job.”
I acknowledged with a single nod. Tyrel said, “Any questions?”
Silence.
“All right then. Let’s do this.”
The other squads broke off in their various directions. By Tyrel’s reckoning, we were directly south of the development, which meant we would have to turn left off the highway and travel upward through dense woodland to reach our destination. As we walked, Rojas told me climbing the side of the mountain was a good thing despite the effort involved.
“The walkers don’t like climbing,” he said. “They’ll do it if they’re chasing something, but otherwise, they follow the path of least resistance.”
“You seem to know a lot about the infected,” I replied.
“In this line of work, you have to. Keep your eyes open. You might learn something.”
We passed signs informing us we were entering the Aspen Acres Nature Trail. Tyrel turned onto a dirt path that took us east down a set of long switchbacks, then up again over a ridge.
As we topped the ridge, I stopped and stared at the valley below. N
estled in the bottom were clusters of what my father would have called McMansions, big ostentatious monstrosities of homes lacking in character or charm, completely incongruous with their natural surroundings. They sat on half-acre lots with paved U-shaped driveways boasting four-car garages and swimming pools choked with leaves, algae, and debris. Infected wandered the streets, tiny as ants in the distance. Rojas stopped beside me and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun.
“Looks good,” he said. “Nothing burned down. Should be plenty of salvage.”
“Quite a few infected down there.”
“You wanna earn, you gotta take some risks.”
A quarter of a mile from the tall metal gate surrounding the development, Tyrel held up a hand for the squad to stop, signaled for silence, then pointed at me. I took the hint and moved up until I was close enough to kneel beside him.
“Fix your suppressor,” he said in a low voice.
“What’s wrong?”
He pointed ahead through the woods. I followed the line of his finger and saw the problem.
“Shit. Infected.”
He withdrew his suppressor from his vest and tightened it down over the muzzle of his M-4. I did the same. “Had to happen sooner or later,” Tyrel said. “Let’s try to do this quietly.”
Tyrel ordered the rest of the squad to fan out in diamond formation and watch all approaches. While they obeyed, the two of us worked our way down the hill, watching the infected the whole way. The ghouls moved in our direction, heads turning and twitching like deranged birds. I guessed they heard us, but had not pinpointed our position yet. This meant we would have to work quickly; if the infected got a fix on us, they would start squawking and bring every walking corpse in the valley down on our heads. When we were about fifty yards from the closest of them, Tyrel signaled a halt.
Leveling his rifle, he held up two fingers and made a go-forth motion over his shoulder. Taking that as a cue, I peered through my scope, sighted in on what had once been a fifty-something man with a bushy white beard, and squeezed the trigger. To my right, the muted crack of Ty’s M-4 broke the silence.
Wasting no time, I picked another target and fired. Before it fell, I caught sight of its eyes through the magnified view of my scope. Its milky gaze was fixed firmly in my direction, looking right at me. Or so it seemed, anyway.
Half a magazine later, the infected were all down. A couple of them started making odd chuffing, croaking noises, but we shot them before they could work up a head of steam. Tyrel glanced back at me, gave a thumbs-up, and signaled to fall back with the rest of the squad. On the way, he radioed third and fourth squads for a status. They were in position, so Tyrel asked them to fire a few rounds to get the attention of the infected in the streets below. Seconds later, three sharp cracks echoed from the north.
“That ought to buy us some time,” said Tyrel. Back with the rest of the squad, he said, “Rojas, I want you to take Hicks and move straight down the hillside.” He pointed due east from where we sat, directly toward the development. “Radio when you’re close enough to make an assessment.”
Rojas stood up. “Will do. Come on, new guy. Class is in session.”
I got to my feet and began following him down the hill. Behind me, Tyrel said, “Head on a swivel, Caleb. Got it?”
“Got it.”
*****
Rojas put his back to the wrought-iron fence and laced his fingers at groin level. “Up you go.”
I stepped into his hands, gripped the cold black fence poles, and levered myself up until I could put a boot on his shoulder. Once there, I stepped up, grabbed the support crossbar ten inches below the spear-shaped tips of the fence, and pushed until I was lying halfway over. The thick material of my MOLLE vest kept me from being skewered.
Throwing my legs over, I planted my boots against the fence and slid down. “Okay,” I said to Rojas. “Your turn.”
Leaning against the poles, I reached my hands through and laced my fingers as Rojas had done for me. He climbed up nimbly, pushed off my shoulder, and threw himself over the spikes.
I said, “Looks like you’ve done this before.”
He looked smug. “Once or twice.”
As I turned toward the street leading into the neighborhood, Rojas hissed for me to stop. He dropped his pack, unlashed the bundled cylinder, and carefully rolled it out onto the dead brown grass. When he stood up, he was holding a three-and-a-half foot double-edged sword.
“Hicks, meet Penelope.”
I stared. The sword looked nothing like what I had seen in books and museums. Its blade was wide and thick like a Roman Gladius, but much longer. I could have called the leather-wrapped hilt two-handed, except it was far more than that—four-handed, maybe. The crossguard was a simple rounded rectangle of aluminum, just wide enough to keep the wielder’s hands from slipping up onto the sharpened edge. The blade’s color was a dark reddish-black, like something forged from the leaf springs of a large truck. I had a feeling that was probably not far from the truth.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
A grin. “Ain’t she a beauty?”
“I don’t know which is more worrisome. The fact that you named it, or that you think it’s a girl.”
He laughed. “She’s named after the first girl that ever gave me a blow job and swallowed. We take good care of each other.”
“What a beautiful story.”
“Don’t be jealous.”
“The hell did you find that thing?”
“Had it custom made. Cost a small fortune, but it was worth it.”
I thought about the rubber-tipped spears my father had trained me to wield, and asked, “Who made it for you?”
“I’ll introduce you to him when we get back to town. For right now, we got work to do. Let’s go, new guy.”
We crossed a hundred yards or so of grassy downslope leading to pavement. The asphalt was dark black, free of potholes, the center and shoulder lines vivid yellow and white as though recently painted, the kind of road a wealthy HOA had once paid good money to maintain. I wondered how long it would be before it cracked and crumbled and gave way to trees.
The neighborhood was laid out in a cloverleaf pattern consisting of four concentric circles, each circle lined with houses that grew larger as they wound toward the center. The one we approached was on the southwest portion of the development where the flat valley began sloping up into the mountains. Ahead of us, we saw infected milling about in the yards between houses, slowed down by dry grass nearly knee deep. As we drew closer, the ground began to level out until it was flat and even and the outer row of houses loomed ahead. We stopped at the intersection and dropped to one knee.
“Okay professor,” I said, scanning ahead with my scope. “What’s the plan?”
Rojas pointed to a three-story beast directly across from us. “There. We’ll go in through the back door and clear the place. See if there’s a way onto the roof.”
“Think the infected have seen us yet?”
“Doubt it. They can’t see for shit, but they’ll hear us soon enough. Mark my words.”
We covered the distance at a jog, slowing down as we drew closer to stifle our footsteps. I stopped twice to fire at infected I knew would detect us long before we reached the house. When we reached the back yard, a trio of walkers rounded the corner, snapped their faces toward us, and opened their mouths. I would have shot them, but Rojas took off in their direction, sword raised. I cursed and followed.
The first one began to croak as Rojas swept his massive blade from right to left, sending the top half of the walker’s head spinning into the grass. Without missing a step, he pivoted on one foot and brought his sword down in an overhead chop at the second ghoul, splitting its skull down the middle. Now that he was out of the way, I had a clear shot at the third infected. I took it.
Rojas jerked his weapon free and looked over his shoulder, irritated. I nodded toward the house as if to say, let’s go. Rojas mouthed, Asshole, then joined me by the
door. I reached out and turned it slowly. Locked. Rojas rolled his eyes. “Fuck’s sake.”
I held up a finger, took my lock picks from a vest pocket, and went to work. Ten seconds later, the lock turned and I opened the door.
“After you,” I whispered.
Rojas nodded appreciatively and went inside.
FIFTY-TWO
We swept the house. Empty.
Kitchen: untouched. Lots of canned food and non-perishables. Bedrooms: mostly guest rooms, one master with a full wardrobe that had not been disturbed in a while. Garage: a Cadillac Escalade with a full tank, a live battery, and keys hanging from a hook on the kitchen wall. Standard stuff in the living room.
The bathrooms turned out to be a gold mine, lots of toilet paper. Rojas said we could split the TP fifty/fifty. I asked if LaGrange would have a problem with that, being that I was only a probationary militiaman and only entitled to a half-share of the profits. Rojas said it was the reward we got for going out on point. First pick of the spoils, even for newbies. The only rule was whatever we took had to fit in a trash bag.
It is amazing how much one can fit in a trash bag when properly motivated.
There was a locked door in the kitchen. I picked and opened it to find a set of wooden stairs leading down into darkness. Rojas clicked the button on an LED tactical light and shined it around. The walls were concrete, a single bulb dangled from the ceiling, and a heavy-looking steel door stared at us forbiddingly from the bottom.
“What do you think?” Rojas asked.
“We’ve come this far. Might as well.”
